I want to say: ‘It’s February, and it feels like spring is coming!’ but that would be a big, fat lie. Perhaps because we haven’t really had a proper chill all winter, perhaps because the weather is so relentlessly grey and dull, but I can’t quite get past that sense that winter might still come […]
My under-cover empire is expanding. At the end of the garden I have the rickety greenhouse bought from a neighbour for £100. On my deck just outside the back door I have my beautiful and not even vaguely rickety Hartley Botanic mini greenhouse. And soon, within the next few weeks (energy and enthusiasm willing) I […]
You may call it fluke, or happening-to-have-been-at-the-garden-centre-at-just-the-right-time, but I’m going to call it meticulous planning and green fingers. Yes, for the first time ever, I have a hippeastrum in flower for Christmas, and even some other forced bulbs in flower in the greenhouse too, just like you are meant to have. I’m never entirely sure […]
A little while ago I wrote here of having grown ginger, tumicini and turmeric roots in my glasshouse among other similarly exotic things, as an experiment. I bought the roots from a Thai super market, very much inspired by a Thai grower I met last year who told me that as the British weather didn’t […]
My greenhouse floor is currently covered with what looks like pots of soil, all neatly labelled, some with a covering of grit over the surface. I have been planting bulbs in pots, something I always mean to do and very rarely get around to. But it’s a fine thing to do, packing away little pots […]
I have been cooking with herbs a lot this past summer, making use of the basil that I have finally worked out how to grow (essentially: have a hot and very sunny summer, plus a greenhouse) to make pesto in a vibrant shade of green you never find in the shops, and sprinkling with abandon […]
This time last year I visited a Thai woman living in Dorset who grew the crops of her homeland in her greenhouse. On arriving in England, Nid had despaired of ever growing anything she knew, but she said: ‘I soon found out why everyone in England has a greenhouse’. She got one herself and set […]
The greenhouse may be nearly empty but the plot is full. Completely and utterly chock full, just as is right and proper in July. The plug plants that jostled for space on the greenhouse table and floor have slowly found their places in rows of varying degrees of straightness, and – with a great effort […]
Little by little the greenhouse plants that have been sewn, potted on and juggled about for the last couple of months are finding their way outside. First they have to look sturdy and healthy, and to have produced a few leaves, then they get a week on the back steps – a gentle sunny and […]
After a particularly long and cold winter of convincing ourselves that root vegetables make delicious salads, and that a daily baked potato makes a perfectly healthy one of your five a day, I finally have something fresh and new and green to eat. Today I have eaten my first salad of the year from the […]
I’ve started liking fennel. Really liking fennel. It’s not that I ever actively disliked it, but I was fairly indifferent. I certainly never craved it, never pounced upon each occasional bulb that lucked up in the vegetable box, never searched it out, and never grew it myself. But once you’ve slow baked baby fennel in […]
I wish I could get excited about seed sowing, like you do. When all the proper gardeners start leaping around like little spring lambs, I turn sulky and reluctant. Maybe I’ve been secretly enjoying this long, cold winter because it has put off the time when I have to go out to the greenhouse and […]
